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RULA’s Recent Award-Winners

Posted on March 21, 2016 by Cecile

It’s award season, and time to celebrate and recognize the contributions of our fabulous library staff!

At the recent Ryerson Awards Night celebration, the university recognized excellence in teaching, research, administration, service and leadership. The 2016 event honoured 118 staff and faculty members.

Simon Ly, the Library’s long-time IT Technician, was the recipient of a Julia Hanigsberg Make Your Mark Staff Award for his 22 years of excellence in service and leadership. Librarians Lucina Fraser, Kelly Kimberley, Fangmin Wang and May Yan were recipients of the Librarian Award, for their varied contributions to student support and engagement, and innovation in library services.

In addition to the Ryerson Awards, our talented staff have also received external recognition for their efforts. Librarian Mandissa Arlain, who recently received a Viola Desmond Award, was also awarded an International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) Fellowship to attend the World Library and Information Congress in Columbus, Ohio in August. Mandi was one of only 15 librarians in Canada to receive a fellowship, which pays all conference expenses, including travel.

Our student staff have also made their mark at Ryerson. Jason Chow, a work study student who helps make library resources available in accessible formats, as well as supporting the One Stop Copyright Service, recently received an Experiential Learning Work Study Award. This award recognizes a work study student who has made an impact in fostering a collegial environment, using exceptional interpersonal skills to proactively seek out collaborative ways to work with colleagues in their department and/or across the community. Jason will receive his award at the Student Experience Awards Ceremony on Tuesday, March 29th.

Open Access Textbooks: Open Education Week 2016

Posted on March 10, 2016 by Ann

A Guest Blog By Michelle Schwartz of the LTO for Open Education Week 2016

In February, Ryerson was excited to host Rajiv Jhangiani, a faculty member from Kwantlen Polytechnic University, for a talk on his research into the use of open textbooks to teach psychology. Open textbooks are defined as textbooks to which the copyright holder has assigned an open license, which allows anyone the right to access, reformat, and customize the textbook to best meet their needs. These textbooks can be downloaded or printed in hard copy for a small cost via print-on-demand. The author, rather than a publishing company, retains the copyright, and the textbooks are often peer reviewed.

Dr. Jhangiani is the author of two open textbooks hosted by the BC Open Textbook Project. The Open Textbook Project is an initiative by the government of British Columbia to make education more accessible. By developing open access textbooks for the subject areas with the highest enrollments in the province, British Columbia hoped to reduce the financial burden on students. The project has grown steadily over the course of the last few years, and as of March 2016, could boast of the following statistics:

Number of BC Open Textbooks: 139
Number of students using open textbooks: 12,159
Number of faculty adopting open textbooks: 110
Number of institutions adopting open textbooks: 26 (21 Public, 5 Private)
Student savings: $1,215,900 – $1,540,680

As an example of an open textbook, Dr. Jhangiani’s Research Methods in Psychology is in its 2nd Canadian edition. It can be downloaded for free in a multitude of formats, from PDF to epub, and it can be printed on demand for a small fee – $10.90 for black and white, or $32.25 for a colour version. As a comparison, a textbook on the same topic from a major publishing company is currently retailing on Amazon.ca for $276.

Though the importance of this cost difference to students cannot be understated, perhaps an even greater benefit of open textbooks was brought up by Dr. Jhangiani at his talk – by publishing with an open license, Dr. Jhangiani felt he had much more latitude to provide unique Canadian examples that he thought would be most beneficial to his students, without the pressure from a publishing company to try to address larger markets. Because the textbook is published with an open license, any educator can take the textbook, use the chapters that they like best, and replace Dr. Jhangiani’s examples and case studies with the material that is most relevant to their course. This flexibility is the strength of the open textbook model!

If you are interested in adopting an open textbook in your course, check out the offerings available at BC Campus, Open Stax College from Rice University, and the Open Textbook Library from the University of Minnesota.

If you have questions about adopting an open textbook or you have thoughts on how you might like to use them in your course, contact us at the LTO, michelle.schwartz@ryerson.ca, ext. 2094.

The Ryerson Library and Archives can also assist in finding open access educational resources to use in your teaching – please contact your Subject Librarian , call Ann Ludbrook at ext. 6910 aludbrook@ryerson.ca or have a look at the Ryerson Library Open Access Educational Resources Guide.

Happy Open Education Resources Week March 7th-March 11th!

Posted on March 9, 2016 by Ann

What are Open Education Resources (OER)?

OERs are educational works created by other instructors like lectures, tests, syllabus, assignments, textbooks, journal articles, case studies etc. that the author decides they want to let other educators use freely in their teaching. OERs can be used and reused freely for educational purposes because the author has freely released the work to the public for that use – usually using one of the six types of a Creative Commons licence. These licences allow different levels of use – some allow adaptation and even commercial use and some do not. All Creative Commons licences require citation. The best OER resources are governed by a principle of “The 5 Rs”.

“The 5 Rs” – in order for a resource to qualify as an OER users should be able to

• Reuse – use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)

• Revise – adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)

• Remix – combine the original or revised content with other open content to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)

• Redistribute – share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)

• Retain – make, own, and control copies of the content

(The 5rs is based on original writing by David Wiley, which was published freely under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license at: http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/3221.)

In Canada there are some leaders of Open Educational Resources paving the way to support instructors who want to use resources like these that are free of copyright restrictions. One of these is the BCcampusOpenED resource that hosts Open Access textbooks, including peer-reviewed Canadian editions, and has had adoptions of these textbooks by more than 26 Canadian institutions, saving students over a million dollars of textbooks cost to date. In Ontario eCampus Ontario hosts Open Access educational resources and guides you to other open materials. Toronto Metropolitan University Open Learning has Open Access modules created by Ryerson instructors such as videos from The Naked Entrepreneur and a module Therapeutic Communication and Mental Health Assessment. Michelle Schwartz at The Learning and Teaching Office has created a great best practices resource for faculty and instructors who want to explore open access educational resources called The Open Access Classroom. Open Access Education resources are free for you to use and reuse and adapt to fit your teaching aims as long as you cite the source. Perhaps most importantly these resources are free of copyright restrictions and you can provide them to your students free of charge.

Mandissa Arlain Receives Viola Desmond Award

Posted on March 4, 2016 by Cecile

Congratulations to RULA’s Mandissa Arlain, who was the recent recipient of a Viola Desmond Day Award! The Viola Desmond Day Awards celebrate the work and achievements of strong Black women from Toronto Metropolitan University and the greater Toronto community. Now in its 8th year, the awards help raise awareness of Viola Desmond’s contributions to the civil rights movement in Canada, and the diverse and little-known stories of past and present women of African descent.

The awards are named after four notable women in Canadian Black history. Mandissa has received the Ms. Chloe Cooley Ryerson Staff Member Award, and will receive this award at the Viola Desmond Day Awards Ceremony on Monday, March 7 from 5-8 p.m. in POD250. Recipients of this award have enriched Ryerson’s and/or Toronto’s diversity through initiatives promoting Black history, and have made a positive difference in areas such as equity, diversity, inclusion, human rights, social justice and community-building.

Mandissa has worked at RULA since 2003 in a number of different roles – as a Library Technician, Circulation Services Supervisor, and more recently, as a Librarian, after having completed her Masters in Information Studies at the University of Toronto’s iSchool. Mandissa was a member of the university’s Anti-Racism Task Force, formed in 2010, and also volunteers for the 100 Accomplished Black Canadian Women (ABC) Project. This is the second time a staff member from RULA has won a Viola Desmond Day Award – librarian Lucina Fraser was also an award recipient in 2010.

Celebrate Fair Dealing Week – Celebrate User’s Rights

Posted on February 24, 2016 by Ann

What would happen if everytime you wanted to use an image in an school assignment, instead of just crediting it – you had to write to the photographer for permission to use it? Or your instructor wanted to use that same image in a preszentation but they needed to wait to hear back from a publisher for permission before they could post it to D2L – and your test is Friday? What would happen if you wanted to photocopy a single chapter of a Library Reserve book to read at home – but first you needed the formal ok of the author? What about if you were working on a research assignment with a classmate and wanted to send a single article you scanned from a journal to them so they could read it too – but couldn’t because it would be considered copyright infringement. What if your professor could never upload anything ever for you to read to your class no matter if it is a just a few pages and important for your educational studies without it being against the law?

Luckily in Canada we have something called fair dealing, a copyright exception that gives you a user’s right to make and use short excepts of copyrighted materials for certain purposes such as education, private study, research and criticism and review – activities you do everyday as a student. If that copyright exception – fair dealing – was not in Canadian laws and in the Copyright Act – that material would be unavailable for you to copy without a licence – which could limit your access to material that contain knowledge you need to learn. Much of what students and educators do on a daily basis would be really really hard without fair dealing.

Fair dealing is really important because it allows a freer flow of information to happen in an educational setting – it promotes learning and scholarship. Creator’s rights (an authors or publishers right to be compensated for the use of a work) is in balance with your right to use a short excerpt of a work without having to get the permission every time you use copyrighted material in your school work. So celebrate Fair Dealing – it is a user’s right that Canadians should use, not lose.

New Videos on YouTube Channel

Posted on February 16, 2016 by Cecile

Yes…we have a YouTube Ch annel! It’s full of awesome videos on topics such as finding scholarly sources, how to determine if a source is appropriate for your assignment, and our famous 3D Printer at work in the Digital Media Experience (DME) Lab! We just added 3 new videos on how to use our InterLibrary Loan system RACER to request items not available at Ryerson. Subscribe today, and you’ll never miss a new video upload!

Valentine’s Day… By The Numbers

Posted on February 11, 2016 by Cecile

Did you know that the average expenditure in 2013 on candies and chocolates by Canadian households was $191? Check out Statistics Canada’s ‘Valentine’s Day… by the numbers‘ for more information about this special day.

For more information about data and statistics resources available at the Library, contact librdata@torontomu.ca or visit the Library’s data pages.

Open Access Wall of Fame

Posted on February 8, 2016 by Cecile

Next time you visit the Library, please drop by our new Open Access Wall of Fame, located on the main floor of the Library, near the Research Help area. The Wall of Fame provides us with an avenue to acknowledge and support Ryerson faculty who consider open access avenues when publishing their work. Open Access material is scholarly work that is made legally available with no restrictions so that anyone can access the full text. RULA supports open access through our Digital Repository, an online space for collecting, preserving, and providing online access to research and teaching materials created by the Ryerson community.

Catherine Middleton is a professor with the Ted Rogers School of Information Technology Management (TRSM), a current Canada Research Chair, and a consistent contributor to the Library’s Digital Repository, a space for collecting, preserving, and providing online access to research and teaching materials created by the Ryerson community. Upon her induction to the Open Access Wall of Fame, Professor Middleton made the following statement: “Publishing work in open access venues like the RULA Digital Repository is crucial to make academic research accessible to broad and diverse audiences, including policy makers, students at all levels, and interested citizens.” Read more about Catherine here.

Dr. Harald Bauder is the Academic Director of the Ryerson Centre for Immigration & Settlement and a Graduate Professor in Immigration & Settlement Studies and the Department of Geography. Dr. Bauder co-authored a report, “Toronto’s Little India: A Brief History“, which is available in RULA’s Digital Repository. This report has been viewed 11592 times, and downloaded 611 times, and is the most popular item in the repository.

Dr. Enza Gucciardi is an Associate Professor in the School of Nutrition and an Affiliate Scientist with the Toronto General Hospital Research Institute. She has written over a dozen publicly-ac cessible manuscripts on diabetes research, many of which are accessible in RULA’s Digital Repository.

Clarification on library acquisitions budget

Posted on December 21, 2015 by Steven

For original posting, please visit: http://www.torontomu.ca/provost/announcements/library-acquisitions-budget.html

On December 13, 2015, CBC posted a story on its website regarding the rising costs of academic journal subscriptions and how these increases impact library acquisitions at the Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN) and Toronto Metropolitan University. Immediately after the CBC story was posted, Ryerson’s Public Affairs requested corrections to be made but not all were fulfilled. The article, which was subsequently retracted by the CBC, referenced a blog post on the Toronto Metropolitan University Library and Archives (RULA) website entitled Library Budgets in the News. The blog post referenced recent MUN library news and how similar budgetary strains could inhibit the Ryerson collections budget. The blog post failed to highlight the investment strategies in place to maintain Ryerson library acquisitions.

Ryerson recognizes the library’s importance to the research and learning of students, faculty, and staff. Over the last three years, the university has allocated over $5 million to the library, beyond its base budget. Ryerson is committed to supporting the library and plans to invest an additional $3.1 million over the next two years. While there are economic pressures, shared by universities across the country, RULA will continue to use an evidence-based approach to make strategic decisions for the university’s collection. In the budget process this year, Ryerson will review and continue to support the library’s acquisition funding needs.

Ryerson has been proactive in protecting the RULA acquisitions budget. Some of the actions include:

To reduce the impact of the lower Canadian dollar, Ryerson invested in the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) Foreign Exchange Project, which allows the university to renew Elsevier Science Direct and Sage Premier at the US/CAD exchange rate. To date, the project has generated a total savings of $10,369.13 and Ryerson will continue to participate in this network.
From 2014-2015, the library received $941,000 in strategic re-allocations in order to retain important content such as Nature Journals, IEEE, and SciFinder for an additional year. This also helped to compensate for the falling Canadian dollar and bolstered the library’s monograph collection.
Guided systematically by its Collections Development policy, RULA identified products through an evidence-based process to ensure the least possible community impact.

Library Budgets in the News

Posted on December 11, 2015 by Sara

Earlier this week, the news broke that Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN) is reviewing 2,500 journals and looking for cost savings where possible. The response has been an outcry from the professoriate at MUN. We thought this was a good opportunity to discuss the collections budget at Ryerson.

Can we anticipate similar activities at Ryerson?

Yes, we can. Academic libraries across the country are enduring a budget crisis. The librarians at Ryerson have been diligently undertaking analysis of our collections to determine where we can find maximum savings with minimal effect on the community. Liaisons are working directly with their departments to keep faculty informed of developments that may affect them. If you are concerned about journals or databases specific to your area, please contact your liaison librarian.

Why are collections being targeted in budget reduction scenarios?

Along with all other departments on campus, the library has had to reduce its base budget for eight consecutive years. Sustaining journal subscriptions on an annual basis requires base funding. Given that our subscription costs have a standard inflation rate of 5-10% per year, this alone has created a difficult situation. Coupled with the historic low of the Canadian dollar – like MUN, the vast majority of our subscriptions are billed in US dollars – we find ourselves in an unprecedented situation, and must make difficult decisions. We simply cannot maintain our current levels of spending within the confines of our reduced budget allocation. Unless the Canadian dollar recovers, we can continue to expect the loss of access to some resources.

How can we maintain our reputation if we don’t have access to the latest research?

Librarians are working hard to ensure that we are not sacrificing core journals. We also provide access to top-notch document delivery services, sometimes providing access to PDF articles held by other university libraries in your email in under 48 hours. In some cases, we are maintaining access to a journal via an aggregator database with embargoed access. These embargo periods are set by the publishers and are not within our control. We encourage faculty who may be on editorial boards address this issue and advocate for an end to embargoes and turn toward more progressive Open Access policies.

What can I do to prevent further cuts to the library budget?

Advocacy is key. As publishers reap profit margins of upwards of 40%, academic libraries simply cannot keep pace with the cost of subscriptions – and nor should we. As viable Open Access models emerge, we must band together and be forces for change. The Tri-Council agency has demonstrated leadership in this area with their new Open Access policy. This is the beginning of a sea change – we must be part of it and see the opportunity that has been presented in challenging circumstances.